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Scientists monitored brains replaying memories in real time
- overcast 7y agoWhat a timely article, as I JUST watched Brainstorm for the first time tonight. The story is exactly this.
- fourmyle 7y agoProbably not a coincidence
- overcast 7y agoWell, considering it's been in my Netflix DVD queue for years, and it just happened to be next in line. Pretty big coincidence!
- taneq 7y agoIt's called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ...), and now that you know that, you're gonna be seeing examples of it everywhere.
- bookofjoe 7y agoMovies like "Brainstorm": "The Final Cut" "Strange Days" "Total Recall" "Altered States" "Lawnmower Man" "Ex Machina" "The Thirteenth Floor" "The Truman Show" "Inception" "Selfless" "Flatliners"
- dpau 7y agoalso wim wenders' "Until The End of the World"
- kibibu 7y agoJust to be clear, because the headline is a bit awkward - the scientists didn't replay the memories. There's no device to implant false memories or anything in this article.
- Swizec 7y agoLuckily we can already implant false memories with advertising. https://www.wired.com/2011/05/ads-implant-false-memories/ https://www.wired.com/2011/05/ads-implant-false-memories/
- hirundo 7y ago"NIH researchers found that our brains may store memories in neuronal firing patterns that are replayed fractions of a second before remembering." So it's like a phonograph record. First the track is inscribed from the source sound (storing a memory). Then the needle is placed in a groove (by some triggering experience). Then the needle traverses the inscription, playing back the recording (remembering). The brain just does it on a different chemical medium than vinyl. To me the most magical part is however the brain so deftly places the needle in the right groove as a response to the triggering experience. That seems to go beyond the phonograph metaphor.
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- aperrien 7y agoTo me, it much more closely resembles a key-value retrieval system. I wonder if we could learn anything about that by training an artificial neural net to perform key-value storage?
- BurningFrog 7y agoYeah, my brain can prolly be 80% modeled as a Redis fork...
- PureParadigm 7y agoI think it's more like a graph with edges between associated bits of information. It's easy to remember things in order, but random access is hard unless you've established links for it. For example, if you memorized how to play a song, each part links to the next but harder to ask someone what is the n-th note in a song, even if they can play the song. It would explain why making associations is a useful memory technique. Traversing this graph when you aren't near what you're looking for can be hard ("it's on the tip of my tongue").
- grawprog 7y agoNot only that, but sometimes as happened to me recently with my own song, you completely forget how to play it until you hear it and start playing it, then suddenly you remember every little note and nuance you do did, but only while you're playing it and good luck explaining to someone what you're doing even as you're doing it.
- xwdv 7y agoI’ve always wondered if there is a way to stimulate a brain so that you could replay a memory so vividly that it practically feels like you are there reliving it again, like the way you might experience a dream but with more clarity, almost like a form of time travel. I remember reading about some experiment in a psychology class where an old woman’s brain was probed and she was able to hear her highschool graduation sonata clearly as if it was being played in the room. There must be a way, there’s so many memories I’d like to revisit firsthand, and people I’d like to see again that are no longer with us.
- p1mrx 7y agohttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22282432 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22282432
- vekker 7y agoYou can achieve this clarity in a lucid dream... how accurate the memories relived would be, is another matter
- mhh__ 7y agoIt's still very sci-fi now, but I would bet a fiver that in my life time-ish or 2 we will have bidirectional brain computer interface.
- stanfordkid 7y agoTake some ketamine :) ... I'm stating this as someone with first hand experience, so it may seem hand wavy and "made up": memories are visual and those visuals directly trigger your nervous system which then responds and often impacts the visual memory replay (often cutting it off or moving to something else). Your nervous system is also constantly telling your visual system what to "lookup". Ketamine dissociates the nervous system from visual memory so you can sort of play the memory through like a spectator. I think this is why it is so effective at treating things like PTSD -- the memories are often so frightening or triggering to the nervous system that they cannot be replayed, understood and integrated... but with Ketamine cutting off the nervous system they can be understood without a panic attack or heart rate shooting through the roof.
- jxcole 7y agoOne of the most fascinating things this article claims is that apparently these scientists were able to detect the firing of individual neurons. I have briefly looked up some of the technologies involved in brain scanning before and if this is true it would be greatly exceeding typical resolutions.
- aurelian15 7y agoWell, it's not a scan, it's a recording from a micro-electrode array (MEA) implanted directly into patient's brains who's skull was already opened for (I guess) surgery. Direct link to the article (with paywall): https://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6482/1131 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6482/1131 DOI: 10.1126/science.aba0672
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- onetimemanytime 7y agoFinally, we may need those much talked about tin foil hats as we walk down the street.
- alfiedotwtf 7y agoHow long until we see the headline “Summons allows court to monitor brains replaying memories in real time”
- r_singh 7y agoIt will never be easy. This kind of tech will rely on the subjects thinking of that memory. And you can always, well, choose not to. Or even corrupt the memory deliberately by imagining things.
- codegladiator 7y agoIsn't it very hard to "not think about it" when required to not think about it ?
- samplatt 7y agoIt's a skill that you can practice through meditation. But false-memories and fabricated memories will shoot this idea down long before that stuff comes into play. Memory is no where near reliable enough to be used as evidence like that.
- sysbin 7y agoYou don't choose anything. I'm finding it hard that anyone can think otherwise with research such as the article indicating function before awareness.
- emrehan 7y agoThere is a theory on how memories are formed on neural networks through cycles of firings by an artificial intelligence pioneer. I’ve searched for it again to no avail. Is there such a theory by Minsky?
- Deeplybrassic 7y agoI think a memory is not just repetition, but collision of different paths that lead to permanent memories
- r_singh 7y agoThis reminds me of a tangentially related episode of mind field, in which a Japanese researcher is working on tech that one day could be able to read people's dreams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgbeGFYluEA&vl=en https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgbeGFYluEA&vl=en They basically ask people to look at different faces and measure their brain waves while they're doing so and then later ask them to think of different faces from the ones they saw and try to guess which one they were thinking of at that time. Pretty cool.
- justlexi93 7y agoThis begs the question of why they used animals for 20 years.
- grimwall 7y agoThey will keep using animals because we know fuck all about how actually brains work and you cannot slice human brains and probe them to see electrical properties all the time since they are supply-constrained. This study is using a information channel of very very high-level, top-down approach.
- hnarn 7y agoReminds me a little bit of the book "Recursion", which I can highly recommend (4.2/5 on Goodreads).[1] [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42046112-recursion https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42046112-recursion
- aiyodev 7y agoI think this is good place to remind everyone that your brain doesn't actually remember events. It only remembers the last time you remembered it. Every time you access a memory it's a lossy rewrite influenced by the emotions you are currently feeling and other memories you associate with it.
- eoikonomou 7y agoAnyone else reminded of Black Mirror's The Entire History of You [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050/]?
- archi42 7y agoSomething always worth remembering: The brain is not even as well understood as we'd like to. For what it's worth, they might just be measuring something that's analogous to a data bus. E.g. in PC terms: I can probe the data bus' copper traces on a PCB, but that doesn't really tell me how the actual flash memory silicone works. (This doesn't make the research pointless though).